When Trevor and Jordan Manton talk about family, business, and drag racing, the three threads are impossible to separate. For the brothers behind Manton Pushrods and Manton Rocker Arms, their lives have been shaped by a lineage that stretches from the lunar missions of the 1960s to the quickest doorslammers on the planet.
Their grandfather, Noel Manton, and father, Terry Manton, laid the foundation of a family company that became synonymous with precision, craftsmanship, and innovation in valvetrain components. Now, Trevor, 30, and Jordan, 26, are leading the next generation, balancing respect for tradition with a relentless drive to modernize.
Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in DI #197, the 30 Under 30 Issue, in November/December 2025.
“I was raised at the racetrack as one of the racetrack diaper boys,” Trevor says with a laugh. “There’s plenty of diaper girls too, like Krista Baldwin (a 2016 DI 30 Under 30 honoree). I just remember us all being at the track as kids because our parents or grandparents had been involved in the industry for so long.”
That early immersion wasn’t accidental. Their grandfather drove for Chevrolet and their father founded the company that would become Manton Pushrods as a teenager, buying his first lathe from Ed Iskenderian and machining Type 1 Volkswagen pushrods. “I just was blessed to be born into the fraternity with a seat at the table,” Trevor says. “Grandpa and Dad had been doing this for as long as most. Essentially, since the racing industry was around.”
Even their great-grandfather, an electrical engineer for Rockwell International during the lunar program, spent weekends racing at Lion’s Drag Strip with fellow engineers. “So even Great-Grandpa was a racer,” Trevor adds.
Trevor’s earliest memories aren’t of being in the stands but in the shop. “Maybe five years old I would come in,” he recalls. “We’d get large stocking orders from SCAT and CB Performance – thousands of pushrods at a time. It was a lot faster for Dad if I put the tips into the tube for him and then he assembled them. So, I’d stand there with a step stool and my safety glasses on and be putting tips in while he’s explaining different things about the family business and what’s important.”
By the time he was 10, Trevor was traveling with his father to races across the country, listening to conversations with crew chiefs and team owners about what worked and what didn’t. “To be able to watch that from an unfiltered perspective at such a young age was something that gave you a different mindset,” he says. “That was really cool.”
When Trevor was 16, tragedy struck. Their father, Terry, who had battled cancer and autoimmune disease for years, passed away. Their mother, Robin, had already been quietly running the business while caring for her husband and raising two boys. “She had good control of the business while I was still finishing school and building my own business, but she didn’t want to continue running it by herself.”
Faced with a choice between his own growing business and the family legacy, Trevor didn’t hesitate. “Even though the business that I had had good opportunities and was growing, the opportunities that I had in the racing industry were completely different,” he says. “I can call a Steve Morris or a Pat Musi and they’ll pick up and have a conversation with me without asking why I’ve called. Because they know that I have the industry’s goals in mind – to make cars faster and safer for all of us.”
Trevor sold his business, joined his mother full-time, and committed to carrying Manton Pushrods and its sister company into the next generation.
One of Trevor’s proudest accomplishments has been reviving Manton Rocker Arms, which at one point was on the brink of closing. “The business wasn’t self-sustaining, and the pushrod company was carrying it,” he recalls. “I simply asked Mom to take the risk. ‘Could we buy Grandpa out of the business, and could I take control of the rocker-arm company and see what it would do?’”
What it did was flourish. “We took the company from selling 10 engines worth of rocker systems a year to 400-500 sets a year in a matter of less than a decade,” Trevor says. “It’s something that I’m proud to have been able to utilize those resources that Grandpa and Dad had put around us.”
Trevor’s philosophy blends pride and pragmatism. “Me and my brother have a commitment to quality while having the desire to provide great efficiency,” he says. “We’re going to continue to improve our product line as far as the offerings and expand what we offer but without compromising quality.”
That commitment includes keeping manufacturing in the United States. “How many young guys are in the industry trying to be a manufacturer in the United States and not outsource parts?” he asks. “We bought Stage V Rocker Arms because we wanted to carry on Eric Hansen’s family legacy and keep a family-owned, high-quality brand still alive. We’re here to preserve quality legacy in this industry.”
While Trevor was finding his footing as a leader, his younger brother, Jordan, was quietly charting his own path. “I’ve been in it my whole life, getting dragged around to different racetracks with Dad,” he says. “I remember going to Vegas all the time as a kid and staying in the Excalibur and playing at their arcade for hours and then going to see the races.”
Jordan’s creative mind steered him to the design side of the business. “The first thing that I ever designed was a rocker system for a 24-valve Cummins, which we still actually sell,” he says. He taught himself SolidWorks during the summer between middle school and high school, guided by his grandfather, who had him measuring Duramax rocker shafts and learning the fundamentals of geometry and designing.
Jordan eventually earned a mechanical engineering degree, a first for the family. “I thought it would be best to actually have somebody get a degree,” he says. “We’ve all been self-taught over here. I thought it would be good to try to figure out what we didn’t know, if that makes sense.”
In school, his focus grew from designing new parts to improving manufacturing efficiency. “We’re making these parts but then we’re hand-loading a part into a machine three times and we’re making a thousand of these things,” he says. “What are we doing? We’re just putting a hole in a tube – it shouldn’t be that hard.”
That mindset led to automation systems that tripled production efficiency, pneumatic pushrod assembly stations, and in-house machining programs that cut cycle times dramatically. “We went from high-effort 200 parts a day to low-effort 800 parts a day with the new loading systems.”
Since graduating, Jordan has shifted back to rocker-arm design. He’s led new development in LS, Hemi, and sprint car applications, all while expanding the company’s in-house machining capabilities. “Maybe it is a good idea that we do it this way, maybe it’s not,” he says. “It’s worth considering the possibility that the way everybody does it isn’t the right way. You find a couple little details that people have just done maybe because it’s easy or because it’s the way we’ve always done it, and those are usually the best spots to fix.”
That mindset has already yielded results, including a patent-pending Gen 3 Hemi rocker system concept. “Even our own stuff that we put effort into, if we’re doing it wrong, we want to figure that out,” he says. “I’m not against fixing something if it’s not right, even if it’s my great idea that I worked a year-and-a-half on. If it could be better, we’re going to make it better.”
Both brothers understand the weight – and the privilege – of carrying their family name forward. For Trevor, it’s about stewardship. “This is a legacy-based business,” he says. “I need to do the same things for my son and my niece. We want to give them the opportunity that we were given to take over the family business if they so choose to.”
For Jordan, it’s gratitude and perspective. “I do very much recognize that I have been given the opportunity to be creative in a way that other people are not able to get,” he says. “Not everybody comes into a family that has a racing background and already has a business started. And I get to go tinker around and spend days and weeks just trying to make a machine work a little better.”
But the heart of Jordan’s story – and the brothers’ shared mission – comes back to their mother, Robin. “Though she’s often not looked at, I think she’s had a bigger hand in getting this company to where it is than anybody else,” he says. “It’s awesome to see her get to the point in her life where she’s able to let it go a little bit. She was the one running the business while [Dad] was at home. And now after he passed, figuring out, ‘OK, how do I steer this ship on my own and have two young kids at home that I have to take care of?’”
Jordan has watched her perseverance turn into peace. “There’s times where her hair was falling out, she was so stressed,” he says. “But to see her now…she just got back from a resort in Mexico and she’s going road-tripping around. Seeing all of her hard work rewarded really warms my heart.”
Looking ahead, both brothers are driven by the same mindset that defined their father. “We’re going to continue to improve our product line and expand what we offer without compromising quality,” Trevor says. “We’re here to preserve quality legacy in this industry.”
Jordan envisions growth through collaboration. “I’d like to continue what we’ve started,” he says. “Continue to spread out through valvetrain and figure out ways to make things better. I want to build an R&D team. All the design work and innovation has been, in some way, channeled through the void in between my ears. We have a great team here, but I want to have a group of brains that work together and facilitate some teamwork to take care of customers better.”
Offering continued value to their customers is another motivating factor for Jordan. “By improving our systems and making everything more efficient, we’re able to reduce our costs, which means we can keep prices in line for our customers,” Jordan says. “We’ve seen our competitors and other companies in the industry raise prices, and we’ve seen our material costs increase. But in some cases, we’ve actually been able to lower our prices because our processes are more efficient.”
For all their technical expertise, what stands out most is their shared ethos. As Trevor sums it up simply: “My main focus in life is faith, family, and racing.”It’s a mantra that echoes through every part machined, every new design drawn, and every late-night brainstorm between brothers who know exactly what they’re building – because they’ve been building it their whole lives.
The post DI 30 Under 30 2025: Trevor and Jordan Manton first appeared on Drag Illustrated.
